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No easy path from heroin's gravity after Denver Post series

Oldest of the siblings Danny Leslie, 31, comforts his younger sister Sara Landry 24, as she is overwhelmed at the sight of their baby sister during the final viewing of Amanda Rose Landry, 22, at the Advantage Runyan Stevenson Chapel in Lakewood. (Joe Amon, The Denver Post)

Lynn and Debbie Gerlach sit amid the soothing familiarity of their suburban kitchen, every comfort a reminder of their beloved, infuriating Amanda living on the streets far from such sanctuary.

Amanda Rose Landry, the Gerlachs' ward since she was 8 months old, died of an apparent heroin overdose on the streets of Denver just before Halloween. She was 22.

Debbie Gerlach said she has always thought of human life as a candle, and a baby as a bright flame.

"Amanda started going dimmer in eighth grade," she said.

Landry was among a small group of heroin addicts and panhandlers described in a Denver Post series in early October that tracked a worrisome trend of painkiller abuse, leading to cheaper heroin addiction and burgeoning street crime. When she wasn't in jail on drug charges, Landry followed and relied on a young fellow addict, Angel Gamboeck.

Landry didn't want to be named in the story or shown in the disturbing photos, for fear of shaming her extended Lakewood family. Now, the Gerlachs want to tell about Landry's life, in the hope it might stop any other young woman from picking up a needle.

Lynn Gerlach, 57, glances out the window on a damp, gray November afternoon and shakes his head. Amanda chose hard beds on street curbs and loading docks, even when relatives or friends offered her a room.

"I'd look out on a rainy day like today and wonder if she was cold," he said.

Gamboeck, for her part, is attempting the kind of turnaround Landry could never manage, yet has found serious trouble in the effort. Gamboeck, 23, was arrested this month in Wisconsin on suspicion of using a stolen debit card, and police found a trove of stolen goods in the apartment where she was staying with her family.

While handcuffed as deputies searched the apartment, Gamboeck told them about her heroin addiction and that she was down to the last few doses of her prescribed Suboxone, a heroin-replacement therapy meant to ease withdrawal.

Didn't want to be clean

In Wisconsin county jail awaiting a bail-reduction hearing, Gamboeck said by phone she couldn't discuss the arrest but that she was feeling physically stronger. She had been tapering herself from Suboxone before her arrest, and jail time had forced her to stay off all opiates or replacements. Her withdrawal symptoms were not as bad as she'd feared.

Despite her arrest and new problems, she was proud of weaning herself from heroin since August. Gamboeck said she was saddened by Amanda Landry's death and the loss of a faithful, funny companion when she was on Denver's streets. But she also said Landry didn't look ahead and was vulnerable to overdose every time she left jail.

"I knew I shouldn't be there, and that I should be with my family, but because I was strung out on dope so bad, I just couldn't get myself to do it," Gamboeck said. "But she never mentioned wanting to be clean; she always said she wasn't ready to."

Overdose, jail and breaking free of the intense addiction are the three main paths followed by heroin users, say counselors, former addicts and families of those affected.

Like many users, Amanda Landry went down all three roads.

Amanda was the youngest of four. Her troubled mother had already given up two older girls to their grandmother. Debbie Gerlach, 58, Amanda's aunt, and Lynn had already adopted a son when they agreed to take on Amanda when she was still an infant.

"We thought we'd give her a good home and see if she could turn out OK," Lynn said.

Amanda's mother was often gone two years between visits, though she never agreed to full adoption.

"Amanda felt that abandonment," Debbie said.

By third grade, she was seeking out the troublemakers for companionship, Debbie said.

Amanda loved to write and to draw, and showed some promise at both, but spent more and more time hanging out with friends on Green Mountain. She loved smoking pot, Debbie said, and then used painkillers after having surgery for a fallopian cyst.

They don't blame her "bad" friends, as many parents do. Amanda was always different and, somehow, agreeably unreachable, they said. She never wanted to learn to drive, never dated, never wanted to be alone.

She quit high school but later got a GED. She'd keep jobs at retail stores for relatively long periods, a year or two, but would eventually get fired, perhaps for stealing or other transgressions. Two years ago, on Lynn and Debbie's anniversary, Amanda was arrested for possession of narcotics.

Overdose didn't stop it

A year ago, Debbie was to pick up Amanda at a motel and take her to the motor-vehicle office to get a new ID. No response at the door. Debbie insisted that a clerk open the room, and Amanda was inside, unconscious from an overdose.

She was in the hospital for five weeks and then forced to relearn talking, walking, eating. Upon leaving, she bypassed all offers of beds and returned to shooting up, panhandling and shoplifting.

"We stood around her bed after her overdose and asked, 'What will you do?' I wanted to hear from her, 'I'm ready to change my life.' She was silent. I knew then she'd never give it up," Debbie said.

Amanda claimed methadone was bad for her bone marrow and never stuck with a detox program.

Lynn and Debbie, as many parents do, flip-flopped between tough love and unconditional help. Counselors would tell them they were enabling her drug use by letting her stay at home, so they'd kick her away. Then they'd get a call from jail, and Debbie would bond her out after she had stolen cosmetics.

Along the way, their frustration mounted at a justice and treatment system they see as designed to fail. Courts would order family counseling, and Lynn and Debbie would go, only to have Amanda skip while they were lectured about being better parents. Denver police don't seem to care about the open heroin trade along Cherry Creek and the South Platte, and downtown, the Gerlachs said.

"I'd walk through Civic Center park with her to go to court," Debbie said, "and she'd point out to me all of her pushers."

The family saw her two days after her latest jail stay ended, on Oct. 24. She was staying with a friend at an apartment on Colorado Boulevard, talking about taking college classes, Debbie said.

"She was happy," she said. "Two days later, she was dead."

At a funeral service in Lakewood, Amanda's sisters sobbed periodically but made it through their joint eulogy. Remember that Amanda loved animals, and drawing, and being around people, and had once been a Girl Scout. Try to forgive her, they said, because she would have wanted that.

Lynn Gerlach thinks about the nights he could have driven along Alameda to downtown, to pull Amanda from a dirty sleeping bag and take her home. But he also thinks about how futile that had proven before. Amanda used to say she knew of eight other friends who had overdosed.

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